Time After Time

One more thought per this ongoing multi-blog discussion about time mostly between Edwize and Chalkboard. Isn’t this debate something of a strawman? There are plenty of high performing-high poverty charter schools (and other public schools for that matter) that are notKIPP. Granted, as a general rule they tend to do more with time and/or intensity, but they’re all not KIPP-like in their use of time and their norms and culture.

But setting up the debate as being about whether or not a high-intensity model like KIPP is feasible as the model, as Leo Casey at Edwize seems to in this post, distracts from the more fundamental point that many public schools show that we can do a lot better than we are today, pretty much all else equal (leave aside in the context of more general social policy reforms that many people would like to see). And not to beat a dead horse (something frowned on in the majestic heights of Blogback Mountain) the way through the thicket is to acknowledge that KIPP has an important place as part of a continuum of educational options.

And isn’t that the progressive position in this debate? A deliberate effort to design a system that can accommodate all students seems a lot more progressive than reflexively defending a system that demonstrably isn’t working for a lot of kids. The latter seems, well, reactionary. But in the weird world of edupolitics it’s sort of the other way around right now…

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